Arch Linux + KDE installation log: Step-by-step installation

En my previous article I told you a little about the changes that Arch Linux has with respect to what I am used to doing in Debian, which we will see below because what we have to do is show them how to install Arch without dying in the attempt.

I think it is very good to clarify that if I have come this far it has been because the excellent guide which Gregory Swords He has written on his blog and from which I take much of his content for this article. All credit goes to him.

Tips prior to installation

To install Arch, the 1st thing I advise is to test in a virtual machine, in this way once we are sure of what we are going to do, we can proceed to execute the steps learned on our computer.

The 2nd thing I would recommend is to save all our files in case something happens, and if possible, do an installation with an empty hard drive. Just in case.

And finally my 3rd tip when installing Arch is to have another computer with Internet access in case a problem arises or, failing that, print the installation guide which we can find on the Arch Linux Wiki.

Arch Linux installation step by step

Well, I guess we already have an updated image of the iso of Arch Linux. Like GEspadas, I recommend using those corresponding to the dates: 2013.07.01, 2013.01.04, 2012.12.01, 2012.11.01, 2012.10.06, 2012.09.07, 2012.08.04, or higher, as they use the same installation method which we will describe below.

You can download the latest compilation of the iso image from this link:

Download Arch Linux ISO

The first thing is to transfer our image to a USB memory, or burn it on a CD-ROM «–Really, in the 21st century? ¬_¬

Once we have put the memory in the USB port, we proceed to know what its name is, for this we can use the command:

dmesg |tail

Which will return something like this:

[14403.197153] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Write Protect is off [14403.197157] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 [14403.197299] sd 7: 0: 0 : 0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present [14403.197303] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14403.198325] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present [14403.198329] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14403.198726] sdc: [14403.199372] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present [14403.199376 ] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14403.199379] sd 7: 0: 0: 0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

As you can see, in this case my memory is sdc. Knowing this, we can proceed to pass the .iso image to memory, which must be unmounted:

$ dd if=archlinux-2013.07.01-dual.iso of=/dev/sdc

This takes a while, but when it is finished we restart our computer and make sure it boots from the USB device.

Once the PC boots we will find this screen, and in my case, I select the first option (64 bits).

1. Configuring the keyboard.

When we load the prompt we will see something like this:

The first thing we must do is select the keyboard layout we are using. In my case:

# loadkeys us

Yes, I speak Spanish but my keyboard is in English .. so I use us, but if your keyboard is in Spanish, then it would be:

# loadkeys es

We can see all the available layouts for the keyboard with the following command:

# ls /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty

2. Partitioning the disk

Now comes the most critical part of the installation. To partition the disk we use a tool a bit complex to handle, called cfdisk. So we type:

# cfdisk

And something like this appears if we have the hard drive without partitioning:

With cfdisk what we will do is configure our partition table. In general, the normal thing in Arch Linux is to configure 4 partitions, as GEspadas explains:

• The first, / Boot, is where the essential files to boot ArchLinux will be stored (such as the kernel, ramdisk images, the bootloader, etc). A size of 100 MiB is recommended (no need to give it more space).
• The second is partition / (root), where the operating system and applications will be installed (among many other things). Its size depends on how you want to use ArchLinux. About 10 GiB should be more than enough for a traditional system; If you think that you will install many applications (games, among them), it is better to think about 20 or 30 GiB.
• The third is partition / Home, where our personal settings, application settings (and your profiles in them), and traditionally our data (documents, photos, videos, etc.) will be stored, so it is recommended to allocate a considerable hard disk space.
• Finally, choose the size of the partition swap, place where information from the RAM memory is temporarily stored (when it is full) on the hard disk. What size to choose for the swap?

Now, if we have an unpartitioned disk, we have to create the partitions by placing ourselves on the free space (Free Space). What we do is give Enter about  New and it doesn't get something like this:

We give enter and we have to put the size we want to use. In this case, the first partition as explained above is / boot and it doesn't need more than 100 MB of space, so we can put something like this:

And finally, once this partition has been created, we have to set it as Bootable.

For the rest of the partitions the process is the same, except when we get to the partition for the Swap, because once created, we go over it and give Enter on Type and we get something like this:

And we have to make sure that we have option 82 selected.

3. Formatting the created partitions

Now we have to format the partitions that we configure with cfdisk. I do not think it is necessary to say again that this should be done under your full and complete responsibility.

For this we use mkfs in the following way:

# mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1

This partition is formatted in Ext2 that does not have Journaling and therefore the boot is much faster, among other things.

Now we format the partitions corresponding to / and / home, both in ext4. I am assuming that we have left the Swap partition as sda4.

# mkfs -t ext4 / dev / sda2 # mkfs -t ext4 / dev / sda3

Now we go on to format the Swap with the mkswap command and then activate it with swapon:

# mkswap / dev / sda4 # swapon / dev / sda4

4. Mounting the hard drive partitions

We are going to mount the partitions that we have created and formatted in / mnt. We start with the partition for / and we must bear in mind that it is not sda1, but sda2. Be careful with that.

# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Once this partition is mounted, we have to create the / boot and / home directories in it.

# mkdir / mnt / boot # mkdir / mnt / home

And we proceed to mount the corresponding partitions:

# mount / dev / sda1 / mnt / boot # mount / dev / sda3 / mnt / home

5. Are we connected to the Internet?

Before proceeding to the next step we have to make sure that we have an Internet connection.
I honestly don't understand. Why can't the system's "base" packages be installed from the CD-ROM itself as in previous versions? If anyone knows, let me know.

Well, we ping any IP or address that we know will return a response, for example:

# ping www.google.com

And if everything works fine, we move on to the next step. If it doesn't (something weird unless you use iso 2012.07.15), first we have to know what the name of our card is, so we execute:

# ip link

Which will return something like this:

1: what: mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT link / loopback 00: 00: 00: 00: 00: 00 brd 00: 00: 00: 00: 00: 00 2: enp5s0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state DOWN mode DEFAULT qlen 1000 link / ether 18: 03: 73: a3: f3: e1 brd ff: ff: ff: ff: ff: ff 3: wlp9s0: mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT qlen 1000 link / ether 4c: 80: 93: 19: da: 02 brd ff: ff: ff: ff: ff: ff

In my case, the card I'm going to use is the wired one, which is enp5s0. We activate the network with the following command:

# ip link set enp5s0 up

and it is assigned a dynamic IP via DHCP:

# dhclient enp5s0

In the case that you are going to connect via WiFi, please read this link.

6. Installing the Base System

Well, we have Internet and now what we have to do is run:

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

pacstrap is the new Arch Linux install script. When we run it, it will start downloading and installing the necessary packages for Arch to work.

And let's take another pause over here. If like me, they have the repositories on a local server, we have to edit the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and add the path of our repo. For example, in my case I only added in front of the mirrors that are configured:

Server = http://192.168.26.1/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

And ready.

If we have a wired connection, we install:

# pacstrap /mnt ifplugd

If our connection is wifi:

# pacstrap /mnt wireless_tools wpa_supplicant wpa_actiond dialog

Finally we install sudo

# pacstrap /mnt sudo

7. Installing GRUB

Now we proceed to install the Boot Manager, in this case Grub2. For this we execute:

# pacstrap /mnt grub-bios

It is valid to clarify that as the name indicates, this package is intended for those of us who use BIOS. If what you have is UEFI, please read the official documentation about it and if you are interested in using syslinuxBecause GSpades leaves us an excellent guide for it.

8. Generating the fstab file

Now we are going to tell fstab how we have our partitions established .. for this we execute:

# genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

9. Setting up the rest of the system

To configure the rest of the system things, we must do it through a chroot. For this we put:

# arch-chroot /mnt

The next step is to establish what will be the name of our computer. Mine is called Vostro so I just run:

# echo vostro >> /etc/hostname

Now, we create a symbolic link from / etc / localtime to / usr / share / zoneinfo // (replaces and based on your geographic location). For example, for Cuba:

# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Havana /etc/localtime

Later we must configure the file that corresponds to the premises, located in /etc/locale.gen.

We open it with a text editor (nano in this case) and uncomment the locales to use. In my case I uncommented es_ES.UTF-8 UTF-8, but I could have uncommented es_CU.UTF-8 UTF-8. It looked like this:

#es_EC ISO-8859-1 en_ES.UTF-8 UTF-8 #es_ES ISO-8859-1

Then we execute:

# echo LANG="es_ES.UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.conf

And finally, for all this to take effect (and I say this from my own experience), you must execute the command:

# locale-gen

To generate our location as is obvious.

Now we have to set the default keyboard layout. What we did in the first step was just set it for the current session.

# echo KEYMAP=us >> /etc/vconsole.conf

What are we left with? Very little. In a step above we installed GRUB but did not configure it. And that's what we will do now:

# grub-install /dev/sda

And we create the grub.cfg file with the following command:

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Our friend GEspadas, after repeating the installation process several times, noticed an annoying bug in GRUB (not an ArchLinux bug), which shows for a fraction of a second an error message when starting the system:

Welcome to Grub! error: file '/boot/grub/locale/en.mo.gz' not found

Anyway, the solution that GEspadas proposes is to execute:

# cp /boot/grub/locale/en@quot.mo /boot/grub/locale/en_US.mo

Now we proceed to create the initial RAM disk:

# mkinitcpio -p linux

And we are almost done ... we only have to do something very important: Change, or rather, set the password for root. So we run:

# passwd

Exiting the chroot, we unmount the partitions and reboot:

# exit # umount / mnt / {boot, home,} # reboot

10. Creating our user

To add my user, I used the following command:

# useradd -m -G audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,games,power,scanner -s /bin/bash elav

The groups are as follows:

audio - Tasks involving the sound card and related applications.
lp - Printer management.
optical - Handling of optical devices (CD, DVD, etc).
storage - Handling of various storage devices.
video lesson - Tasks involving the video card and hardware acceleration.
wheel - Very important! So that the user can use sudo.
games - Needed for write permissions for games.
- Necessary to be able to shutdown and restart the system.
scanner - Administration and use of digitizers (scanners).

We access the / etc / sudoers file and uncomment the line:

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

11. Activating Network-Manager

I don't know about you but I use NetworkManager to manage my network connections and interfaces.

First, we stop the network daemon:

# systemctl stop net-auto-wireless.service

Next, we deactivate the network daemons that are running.

# systemctl disable net-auto-wireless.service

Lastly, we stop our network cards. If we don't know what they are, we just have to type:

# ip link

In my case it would be:

# ip link set enp5s0 down # ip link set wlp9s0 down

We activate NetworkManager so that it starts at startup with the following command:

# systemctl enable NetworkManager

You can start the NetworkManager daemon immediately with the following command:

# systemctl start NetworkManager

In my case that I use KDE, I only have to install the kdeplasma-applets-networkmanagement package once I have installed my Desktop Environment, but we will see this in the next article.

1. Activate the network without NetworkManager

If we connect by DHCP and we don't need to manage the network manually, we just have to execute:

# systemctl enable dhcpcd@enp5s0.service # systemctl start dhcpcd@enp5s0.service

Sure, they have to replace enp5s0 with the name of your network interface.

And that's it .. We already have Arch Linux installed, configured and running. In the next article we will see how to install KDE without dying in the attempt 😛